the fitz clementine review of books #1
What This Book Is Called: All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost
Who Wrote It: Lan Samantha Chang
What Type Of Book It Is: Literary fiction (novel)
What This Book Is About:
These graduate students who are trying to become poets and the difficult teacher they idolize and how hard it is to make it as a poet and how hard it is to become a good poet and whether it’s worth it to pursue an art form that not many people care about anymore and why a person would want to do that to begin with and also there’s some musing on doomed, thwarted, unrequited, and/or inadequate loves and whether they are worth it and why a person would fall into them to begin with.
Or, as the amazon.com summary says:
“Miranda Sturgis is an exceptional poet, and though her critiques can be ruthless, graduate students at the renowned writing school where she teaches fight to gain admission to her seminars. She proves to be a tantalizing and enigmatic figure to her students, especially Bernard Blithe, one of the most serious poets in the class, and Roman Morris, who fairly burns with ambition. Chang shows the two men, one who regards poetry as an avocation, the other as a means to an end, to be essentially similar in one devastating way: their intense loneliness, which comes from sacrificing all personal relationships for the sake of work. Among the many threads Chang elegantly pursues-the fraught relationships between mentors and students, the value of poetry, the price of ambition-it is her indelible portrait of the loneliness of artistic endeavor that will haunt readers the most in this exquisitely written novel about the poet’s lot.”
Which I think is a good summary, except that I’m pretty sure Bernard’s last name wasn’t Blithe, and that I don’t think it’s so much that poets are lonely as it is that people are lonely and poets are able to say it better than most. The book examines some aspects of loneliness and ambition and creativity that are unique to poets, but I think if it had been about philologists or pastry chefs instead the themes would have come through largely intact, because human beings in general are ambitious and lonely and driven to self-expression and the cultivation of talents (because they are ambitious and lonely to start off with).
What I Learned From This Book:
Sleeping with one’s professors can sometimes be advantageous to one, but sleeping with one’s students is probably a bad idea. People are lonely. It’s difficult to write poetry well. You can say a lot about a character with a few strategically placed descriptions of their tics or quirks. If I go to graduate school, I will meet interesting, sophisticated, fiercely intelligent people who play drinking games that are both ridiculous and ridiculously erudite (as opposed to, say, Beer Pong). Writing letters is always a good idea. Inadequate love is still love, but inadequate art probably isn’t still art. I should really try that making-grilled-sandwiches-on-an-ironing-board thing.
I Would Recommend This Book To:
Poets, people who like poetry, people who are fond of introspection but not of very long or dense novels, melancholic artist types who aren’t too disgusted by the bourgeoisie, people who are or have been embroiled in academia, people who write a lot of letters but don’t have many friends.
Some Extended, Disorganized Rambling About This Book:
This is a very skinny little novel with relatively wide margins, which, to be honest, is the main reason I picked it out of the library’s New Fiction shelf-it was finals week, and I wanted to de-stress myself with some leisure reading, but I also wanted a book that wouldn’t demand too much of my time. Also, I vaguely remembered it getting a good review in the New York Times’ Sunday supplement on books (which is sometimes right and sometimes snobby and the only part of the newspaper I read carefully absolutely every time it comes out). Anyway, it is, in some senses, surprisingly ambitious in scope for its size and delicacy-it follows the lives its major characters for a span of more than twenty years, and raises more questions about the nature of talent and how an artist’s life ought to be conducted than it cares to answer. I think the ending can be read as a simplistic, somewhat cliché condemnation of Roman’s pursuit of renown and approval, or as a romanticized elevation of Bernard’s celibate, hermetic, starving-artist existence-but personally, I don’t believe that Bernard (arguably) succeeds where Roman fails because he is more humble or because he never “sells out,” but rather because, unlike Roman, he knows exactly who he is and what he wants and so doesn’t have the same grasping, inevitably unfulfilled need for other people to tell him that he’s absolutely, truly, always good and right and doing a fantastic job with everything. He doesn’t have to be the best poet ever, just the best poet that he, Bernard, can possibly be-and while Roman wants to reach the whole world with his work, Bernard only ever, really, wants to reach Miranda, and he comes to make peace with the idea that he may never be able to do that. Basically, I think that if Bernard is more successful as a poet than Roman, it’s because his ambitions are more modest to begin with and because he’s able to accept that they may never come to fruition and continue to work towards them anyway.
[…Miranda. Oh, Miranda. You are kind of a mess. I think there’s some tragedy in the way both Bernard and Roman, who I do think loved you after their fashions, still see you as some sort of symbol or as nothing more than the sum of your poetry when clearly you are a passionate, complex, fallible, soft-hearted, slightly insecure, and very very very human woman underneath your callous, aloof, brilliant public persona. I mean, you get upset (but only in private!) after criticizing students harshly, you always wear high-heeled shoes because you think you’re too short, you have an affair with Roman and then you fall in love with him and then you’re unable to move on emotionally when he does and he never quite understands that you did fall in love with him and weren’t just using him or molding him into your idea of what a poet ought to be and then you just sort of decline into this long slow fall but you stay so smart and, usually, dignified through it all and you are actually the one who breaks my heart more than any other character in this book. You almost make up for the only other important female character being little more than a cardboard cut-out of a shallow love interest. Of course, most all of the characters in this story who aren’t you- Miranda-, or Roman, or Bernard, are pretty flat and uninteresting. It’s probably inevitable when a writer tries to stuff a story that spans decades of changing lives and relationships into a novel that’s about 200 pages long, but it’s still one of the most disappointing things about this book. ]
My other criticism of this story, which I may not end up explaining very well because it’s hard for me to quite even pinpoint it exactly, it’s just kind of this nebulous, nagging thing that was bothering me, is that it doesn’t really touch on any social problems or issues or conundrums or…whatever, even indirectly. The characters are all pretty sheltered, all financially well-off with the exception of Bernard, and they are quite myopic about their concerns and in their angst about problems that sometimes seem trivial or abstract. All of that is okay with me (and even, embarrassing as it is to admit, quite relatable). But it bugs me that nothing in the narration or the plot ever points this out or calls it into question; the characters just live in their own little bubble of apolitical privilege and their myopic self-centeredness is presented as justified and uncontroversial. It’s not that I enjoy didacticism or political stridency in my fiction-I usually don’t like it at all. It’s more that when an author pretends that her characters exist in a bubble and then tries to go all Philosophy Of Art on me, the philosophy is undermined because it isn’t factoring in the world as it really is (or a reasonable facsimile thereof). It feels a little bit irresponsible to me, and it breaks my suspension of disbelief in places. (At the very least, I’ll keep thinking, How are they able to afford all those fancy, beautiful house-things on the salaries of a university professor and a stay-at-home mom? Well, I suppose she’s a trust-fund kid or somesuch. There was something about that at the beginning, right? Yeah. Sigh…)
Watch this space! Book reviews may become a regular feature, on account of I read a whole lot!
In other news, I went to get tattooed with my friend spacklegeek today. It was her first time and she was nervous, but she was very determined to get words pressed into the skin of her ankle and very stoic considering that afterward she told me it hurt her a lot. (As she says, she is not a wimp, she is a redhead, and they've got more pain receptors than the rest of us.) Anyway, now her leg speaks Latin and my arms are both entomological. And we probably, like, bonded or something.